Luigi Giussani (1985) on the confusion, even disollution, of the “I” and the “you”:
In the confusion surrounding the ultimate face of the I and of reality, an extreme attempt is developing today that would pursue this flight from the relationship with the infinite Mystery which every reasonable man sees as the horizon and root of every human experience…. If reality seems to escape one’s every attempt at mastery, the extreme resource of pride is to deny reality any consistency, arbitrarily considering everything as an illusion or a game. We call “nihilism” that which reigns today in the world of thought and the worldview of the dominant culture. But it is a nihilism that does not even have a tragic feeling for the defeat behind it and rather conceals this tragedy in a false reduction of everything to a game, to an arbitrary invitation to skepticism and moral superficiality.
For two thousand years, the encounter with the Christian event has been the encounter with a human phenomenon (a man, a companionship) in which the passion for the discovery of the human face and the openness to reality are strangely awakened. This passion is continually reawakened by something that is not the result of our thoughts or of a particular philosophy.
The first two who followed Jesus along the banks of the Jordan are the first protagonists, after the Virgin Mary, of the mysterious re-conquest of our humanity: these were the first protagonists of the encounter with Christ, with this exceptional presence in history. In the Gospel, in which, after so many years, John wrote down his memory of that day, of the encounter with Jesus by the Jordan, of having followed him after the strange words of the Baptist who pointed him out, of the visit to the house where after their question he simply responded, “Come and see,” all these things are described. And yet, as François Mauriac recognizes in a page of his Life of Jesus, this episode remains the most moving episode of the Gospel. In fact, it tells of a precise, historic encounter (it even tells us the time: four in the afternoon!), but in the notes of the disciple almost everything is left implicit. We can imagine what is said only implicitly, seeing how it would become explicit and change the life of those two fishermen, but already their humanity and their heart in that first decisive encounter were struck by a presentiment, by an initial but certain piece of evidence: no man ever spoke like him; they had never met anyone like him. After many years, how many other things they saw and understood, albeit confusedly, about what he started to tell them that day; and still the exceptionality of that encounter remained intact to the eyes of the elderly evangelist. Their heart, that day, ran into a presence that corresponded in an unexpected and clear way to the desire for truth, for beauty, for justice which constituted their simple and humble humanity. From that moment, notwithstanding a thousand betrayals and misunderstandings, they would never abandon him…
Giussani goes on to quote Romano Guardini: “In the experience of a great love, everything that happens becomes an event within its sphere.”